Several members of Congress have been pressing the U.S. intelligence community to investigate claims by an Iranian defector that Teheran planned to crash an airliner into a nuclear reactor in the United States.
Rep. Curt Weldon, who is writing a book on the Iranian regime, said he had been alarmed by the information and had met with CIA senior officials to press for an investigation. So far, the CIA has refused to question the Iranian defector, a former senior official in the 1970s.
Weldon, vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, has met the unidentified defector several times in Paris over the last 22 months. He told the New York Sun the defector has been accurate in predicting several important developments in the Iranian regime since February 2003. The developments were said to have included those in Iran's nuclear weapons programs and support for Al Qaida, Middle East Newsline reported.
The informant, dubbed Ali, was said to have been in contact with two dissidents in the inner circle of the Islamic republic. They were said to have reported a secret government directive by Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei who presided over the nation's strategic weapons programs and financed and controlled groups deemed terrorists.
"This letter is to warn you of an intelligence failure in the process of happening," Weldon wrote in a November 2003 letter to then-Senate Select Committee on Intelligence chairman Sen. Pat Roberts. "I am not asserting that such an attack shall occur. But given [Ali's] record of accurate predictions, shouldn't the Intelligence Community at least be investigating his story?"
The memorandum reported that Ali relayed the Iranian plan to attack a nuclear reactor in New Hampshire during a secret meeting with Weldon on May 17, 2003. The plan, said to resemble that of Al Qaida's suicide strikes against New York and Washington in 2001, called for Iranian-backed insurgents to hijack Canadian passenger jets and crash them into the Seabrook reactor in New Hampshire.
Weldon quoted Ali as saying the attack had been called for between Nov. 23 and Dec. 3, 2003. But he said Iran postponed the attack until after the November 2004 presidential election.
Ali's assertions became public after Weldon failed in nearly two years of efforts to convince the U.S. intelligence community to follow up on the information. Both the CIA as well as the Senate Intelligence Committee failed to act.
Weldon said he plans to publish a book in early 2005 that will outline the purported Iranian plot. The congressman said Ali's report of a plot to destroy a U.S. reactor gained credibility when Canadian authorities arrested 19 people in August 2003 on charges of participating in a terrorist conspiracy. One of the suspects had taken flight instruction and flew an airplane over a nuclear power plant in Ontario.
At one point, Weldon sought to win CIA support to fund Ali to provide more information. But in a 2003 meeting, then-CIA director George Tenet demanded to know Ali's sources in Iran, something the defector refused to do.
Weldon said his forthcoming book would describe the workings of the Iranian regime. He said Khamenei has established a separate government that includes Al Qaida and it allies.
"They are avowed to consummate a major attack inside the United States," Weldon said in an interview with the New York Sun. "In the book I name this plot."
